by Tang Huyen

He shifts shapes easily and fast, and makes it hard to pin him down at any moment, because by the time you pin him down he already moves elsewhere.

I suffer quite often, when I lose mindfulness. Then I become aware of both the suffering and the loss of mindfulness (this is where the recursiveness of mindfulness helps: there is a "supervisor state" that hovers in the background and that brings back mindfulness of the first level when mindfulness of the first level has slipped out), and try to become aware again, often by turning my consciousness backward to become conscious of itself (not of the content of consciousness, but of the act of being conscious, which is at the very bottom of conscious existence, below which there is no consciousness), upon which suffering dissipates and calm, peace, harmony, serenity come back, to various degrees. I exercise a balance between plain consciousness of what happens (consciousness of the first level) and consciousness of consciousness (consciousness at the second level), as the latter interferes with the former and can therefore inhibit consciousness of what happens. There is only so much room for consciousness; however the second-level consciousness is essential in pulling me back from loss of consciousness at the first level.

This is where the crashed people look so lost, in that to me they exhibit neither level. They seem clueless and locked up in themselves. If they lose consciousness of the first level (consciousness of what happens), they look lost enough already (and that is their unrelieved ordinary state), but then they also fail to recover from that loss of consciousness at the first level and show no consciousness that they have lost it at the first level, even when told. They have blanked out (blacked out) at both levels, which makes them look like walking zombies, regardless how gifted they were before their crash (one of them ghost-wrote jokes for a living). This, in addition to the loss of their other gifts, like intelligence, creativity, social perceptivity, etc.

As to dedao (Zero): he is at antipodes with the crashed people (I know, it is damning with faint praise), in that he is incredibly aware, swift, agile, though he is not an intellectual (as I keep saying, intelligence and intellectuality have nothing to do with salvation). He is very sharp, but not in the intellectual manner. He shifts shapes easily and fast, and makes it hard to pin him down at any moment, because by the time you pin him down (which is quite hard), he already moves elsewhere. The crashed people are stuck in shapes, and can scarcely change shapes at all, even slowly. He either acts in total action or comes very close to that, as far as I can tell, considering my above reservations about how to pin him down. Oxtail tries to play that way, but he tries and is not there, and his effort is obvious, even as he tries to hide, whereas dedao is there and keeps confirming it by moving at unbelievable speed, without effort.

Colophon

Posted to talk.religion.buddhism on March 14, 2008. Author: Tang Huyen. Message-ID: <[email protected]>.

Tang Huyen was a scholar of Buddhist studies with deep command of Pāli, Sanskrit, Chinese, and Tibetan sources. Posting to talk.religion.buddhism and related groups from 2003 to 2008, he was among the most rigorous analytical voices in the English-language Buddhist Usenet world. This unusually personal post is one of the few places where TH gives a frank, practical account of his own mindfulness practice. The two-level model — first-level awareness of experience, second-level awareness of awareness itself, a 'supervisor state' that watches whether the first level is present — corresponds to the classical distinction between sati (mindfulness as presence) and sampajañña (clear comprehension, awareness of awareness). TH's candour about suffering when the first level slips, and his use of hui-guang fan-zhao (consciousness turned back on itself) as the recovery mechanism, grounds the theoretical positions of his other posts in lived practice. The contrast between the crashed (blanked at both levels) and dedao (effortlessly shifting, ungraspable) functions as TH's phenomenological scale of spiritual development.

Preserved from the Usenet archive for the Good Work Library by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, 2026.

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